I've arrived. I left in a sept-place from Dakar yesterday morning around 10:30am. Surprisingly only about 3 1/2 hours later, I arrived in Kaolack. I was lucky that we didn't run into much traffic while leaving Dakar. I arrived at the Gare Routiere in Kaolack and waited for people to come pick me up. I turned down taxi after taxi who wouldn't leave me alone. A little Talibe kid came up to me and asked me for my water, and I actually said no. I know I should've said yes, I felt bad, but I only had about 3 inches left in my water bottle and I wasn't sure if I'd have money left by the end of the day to buy myself water, and I can't drink the water here or I'll be sick. Anyway, the kid stuck around by me and asked me if I needed a taxi. I said no and told him a friend of mine was coming to pick me up. He didn't speak French, and my Wolof is horrible, so we spoke in a combination of Wolof and hand gestures. He then told any taxi that honked or slowed-down and any guy who came back asking if I needed a ride that I didn't need their help, which was actually quite nice. The bad thing about being the only white person in the entire Gare Routiere is that everyone sees you as a rich person who they can overcharge so they all rush to your help. The good thing about being the only white person in the Gare Routiere is that when you don't know what the person looks like who is supposed to be picking you up, they can easily recognize and find you. Two kids ran up to me and asked me if I was Shannon, and this was who I had been waiting for.
Amadou and Maggot (yes, those are the names of my two host siblings… yes, the poor girl's name is Maggot) brought me by taxi to their house. I am quite lucky because I now happen to live on one of the two paved roads in Kaolack and I live close to downtown, so it's easy to get around. However, this of course does not mean that my street is void of the trash that this city is known for. Oh no. A drainage type thing lines each side of the street and is filled with trash and what I'm sure is sewage. Yummy. It really is truly disgusting the amount of trash and sewage and whatnot (n'importe quoi) everywhere in this city.
Anyway, I arrived at my house. It looks like I'm living in ruins. Don't get me wrong, I do live in an actual house, and it's nice (relatively speaking), but behind the house looks like a building collapsed and they never did anything with it. There are broken cement pieces that cover the entire backyard. There also is one last standing wall of what used to be a very large and nice house, but now the rest is simply rubble. The house I live in has three rooms; well, technically two rooms but one of them is divided into two by a curtain. There is a porch that is open to outdoors, which is where Amadou works out and sometimes we eat meals and there are a few things stored there. You then walk into a door to the interior of the house, which is also my host mom's and sister's bedroom. In it there are two couches, a queen-sized bed, and a television. Across the curtain in the same room is another queen-sized bed where the boys sleep. From the first room, there is a door to a second room, that second room is mine. I have a king-sized bed, another bed that serves as a couch, a chair, and a huge dresser, plus two bedside tables. Through my room is a door to the bathroom which has the refrigerator, bathtub, and toilet. Needless to say, privacy is very limited, but honestly by now I'm pretty used to it. People walk in and out of my room, but usually just in passing, and that actually doesn't bother me one bit anymore. Houses here kinda make me sad, because they obviously looked a lot nicer when they were built. And they were built to have running water and electricity. There is no running water in this house, and my host mom brings buckets of water in every morning. And the electricity is very sparse. It worked last night, but not at all during the day. Houses everywhere here look kinda like people are living in the aftermath of a war. Windows are often just openings in cement with fabric over them. It's a bizarre thing to see. The paint in each room of my house here is well passed starting to peel off, both the walls and the ceiling. But, it's still very homey.
My host mother hardly speaks French. She speaks Wolof. Same with my 10 year old host sister. And I'm realizing that my basic Wolof that lets me talk to taxi drivers, haggle at the market, count, and greet people, only gets me so far. Basic vocabulary like "taking a shower" which were all rushed through during my last day of class did not at all stick in my memory. But the son who is here speaks French, so he's easy to communicate with. There is a nephew staying with us for the week who is a Baye-Fall who also speaks pretty good French, so I've been talking to the two of them a lot.
Last night I was taken around to meet all of the relatives. I'm sure I met over 30 people last night. This family which I have become a part of, the Dieng family, is one of the biggest in Kaolack. They are also in Thies and Dakar, so all sorts of people in this country know of them. My new name is Ada Dieng (pronounced "aye-duh", "aye" such as in "aye-aye captain"). I hardly remember anyone's names. I made a toddler cry last night, just because I'm white. That was a nice experience. He again refused to eat lunch outside today because I happened to be sitting outside. It feels good to be loved. The adults kept laughing about it, and I repeatedly was told that Senegalese children are afraid of white people. I never found this to be true in Dakar, but I am still one of only two white people I've seen in Kaolack since arriving.
I was supposed to start work yesterday, but because my new host family wanted to take me around and have me meet the whole family, it was postponed til today. This morning when I called my boss, I was told to wait until she called me back. Three hours later she called me back and gave me two numbers to call to get a hold of a girl who will show me what progress has been done on the library project. I repeatedly called the two numbers once an hour, and was told that she was somewhere else. At 4pm today I finally got a hold of my boss again, and she told me that I must just be missing the girl, and that she would tell the girl to call me and she hung up without giving me the girl's number. 15 minutes later she called back, told me that the girl had been looking for me, and gave me the girl's phone number. I tried it twice, it didn't work. I called my boss back again and she said she would verify the number. She called me back 5 minutes later and told me she had given me the wrong number and then gave me the correct one. So I finally called that, and was told that the girl was in the bathroom so I'd have to call back. 10 minutes later I called again, FINALLY got a hold of the girl, she asked me if I was in Kaolack. I said yes, and she said she would meet me at 8am tomorrow at the mosque. GAHHHHHHH. I've been bored all day. I spent time with the family and with the relatives, and they're all nice, but man, I'm going crazy. When I want to get started on something, I have no patience, and this is driving me nuts. At least now I know I'll actually have a purpose for being here tomorrow. So I'm a bit calmed down. But man, earlier today I was kinda losing my mind. I'm now wishing that I had borrowed more movies from my friends before coming, because I only borrowed one, and I already watched that last night. I could wander around and take pictures of the city, but today I really wanted to get something done, and wandering around wouldn't exactly give me a sense of accomplishment. So instead, I got my sense of accomplishment from reading Catch-22 (thank you Patrick, you helped save me from losing my mind today), and with each finished chapter I felt like I had done something.
Alright, enough of my rambling. A few other items to note about my living circumstances. Last night, as I unpacked my stuff, I heard a mouse. Sure enough, about 2 minutes later one scampered across the floor. Late this morning I was in the "main room" of the house watching television with the others when I saw a mouse run under my chair. I can tell if the electricity is working by the refrigerator… if it is chugging away making lots of noise, the electricity is working… if it is quiet, the electricity is not working. The toilet does not have a toilet seat, and I flush it the same way as I did in Dakar, by dumping a bucket of water into it. I take a "shower" by standing in the bathtub with a bucket of water. I was very spoiled the past few weeks with hot showers and electricity, but now it's back to normal.
I am quite lucky again though. The family I am staying with is as nice as can be, even if communication is a bit of an issue at the moment. Hadit, my host mother, is not much more than 30 years old, so she's like a sister. She's always smiling and laughing and gets a big kick out of me when I say things in Wolof. Earlier when I was writing one of the paragraphs above I was zoned out of my surroundings and focusing on my writing, when I realized that she had been calling my name "Ada! Ada!" I ran outside to see her sitting in a chair with her foot covered in blood and a knife with at least 10 inches of blade sitting beside her foot. I ran to get cotton balls and a bucket of water. When I brought it back and cleaned off her foot, it was better seen that the cut was actually quite small, but it had produced a lot of blood. We cleaned it up with iodine solution and put a Band-Aid on it. My first-aid kit was quite helpful. I'm still curious now, because when this happened her nephew was laying on the couch watching television in closer proximity to her, but she didn't call for him she called for me. And he didn't pay any attention as I crossed in front of him a few times with cotton balls and other first-aid type things.
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